The Vicissitudes Of Literary Reputation

By Charles McGrath

Published: June 15, 2003

Most literary reputation is fragile and fleeting, and the reputation of poets especially so. Their stock is traded on a Nasdaq of singular cruelty and volatility. We still read Hemingway and Fitzgerald, for example, but who reads Edna St. Vincent Millay, in her lifetime just as celebrated as her two contemporaries? Almost as famous was Edwin Arlington Robinson, whose best-selling Arthurian trilogy -- ''Merlin,'' ''Lancelot'' and ''Tristram'' -- is something that few readers now would want to linger over, particularly if they were hoping to stay alert enough to drive or operate heavy machinery.

Sometimes death is the making of a poet's reputation, as in the case of Sylvia Plath, the details of whose suicide -- the towel under the door, the unlighted oven hissing gas, the sleeping children in the next room -- lent both poignance and a certain creepy glamour to her posthumous work. Sometimes a poet dies, spends a term in limbo and then is resurrected in a different guise altogether. This is what happened to Robert Frost, who at the time of his death in 1963 was generally considered to be a New England folkie -- the homespun bard of stony walls and snowy evenings. In 1977, the third volume of Lawrance Thompson's biography suggested that Frost was a much nastier piece of work than anyone had imagined; a few years later, thanks to the reappraisal of critics like William H. Pritchard and Harold Bloom and of younger poets like Joseph Brodsky, he bounced back again, this time as a bleak and unforgiving modernist.

But most of the time, death for poets is what it is for the rest of us -- the beginning of that slow, inexorable process of being forgotten. Take the case of Robert Lowell. When he died, in 1977, Lowell was by far the most famous American poet of his era. The only figure of comparable renown was Allen Ginsberg, but Ginsberg was never embraced by the critics the way Lowell was; with his ohm-ing and his finger cymbals, Ginsberg had become a kind of self-caricature. Lowell was cool, but he was also dignified, and his reputation seemed secure and indelible. Within a couple of decades, though, he had all but fallen off the map. His books slipped out of sight, his poems disappeared from reading lists and course catalogs. Almost nobody talked about him -- especially in the writing programs, where younger poets go to learn what they self-consciously call their ''craft.'' Increasingly, Lowell looked like the end of a line and the last of his kind -- the Great American Poet (White Male Div.).

How are the mighty brought so low? In Lowell's case it was probably inevitable. For a while, he loomed so large that he crowded everyone else off the stage. There was a time in the mid-60's when you couldn't pick up the paper without reading about Lowell. When he declined Lyndon Johnson's invitation to read at the White House in 1965, it made Page 1. Lowell actually took Shelley's wishful pronouncement seriously, believing that poets were the unacknowledged legislators of the world. He was a familiar figure at protests against the Vietnam War, and also on the campaign trail, where he served as unofficial consigliere to Eugene McCarthy (a closet poet himself).

Lowell had the good fortune to come of age at a time when poetry hadn't completely gone out of fashion. Eliot and the religion of modernism were still in high regard, and it was even possible for a poet to be awarded a photo spread in Life magazine, as Lowell was in 1947. He was also lucky in his genes. He was a Boston aristocrat -- a Winslow on his mother's side and, on his father's side, connected to the Cambridge Lowells, one of New England's formidable ruling clans. Lowell looked like a poet (White Male Div.). He was big and imposing, with handsome, almost Roman features that were never entirely obscured by those nerdy black glasses he often wore. As he aged and let his hair grow long, he came more and more to resemble someone out of the Old Testament. He also sounded like a poet, intoning his verse in an accent that was part Boston Brahmin, part Southern drawl (an overlay acquired from his teachers). Most of all, Lowell wrote like a poet, in language that was grand, sonorous and memorable. If you were an English major in the 60's, you probably still remember the first time you read ''For the Union Dead,'' with those excoriating last lines:

. . . Everywhere,

giant finned cars nose forward like fish;

a savage servility

slides by on grease.

Even the dullest among us knew that this was the genuine article.

But fashions change, and waiting in the wings for Lowell to get off the stage were quieter, less stentorian poets like John Ashbery (whose style was more elusive and almost surreal) and James Merrill, who was more elegant and witty. The poet whose reputation most benefited from Lowell's demotion was his friend Elizabeth Bishop, the contemporary poet he most admired and who most influenced him. Hers was a case of a poetic stock that had been severely undervalued for years -- in part because she was the opposite of Lowell: private, retiring and unprolific. Though Bishop herself hated identity politics of any sort, her reputation also benefited tremendously from the groundswell of interest in feminist and lesbian poets, and on most campuses now she has far more stature than Lowell. She is indisputably part of the canon, while his ultimate ranking is still uncertain.